Navigating Dark Content in Storytelling

Show Notes

• Grimdark Sauce 
• Death of a Hero
• Brown Girl in the Ring 
• Atmosphere and Tone
• Locke and Key
• Elric 
• Moral Dilemmas 
• Parable of the Sower 
• The State of Nature
• Lord of the Flies True Story 

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Sofia. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. With your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.

[Intro Music]

Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is…

Bunny: Bunny!

Chris: …and…

Oren: Oren.

Chris: We’re just having a great conversation among friends. Nothing to worry about here. That is until I spend 10 minutes describing how my parents were murdered in front of me, how their blood flowed over my hands and into dark, warm pools.

But it’s cool. I got over it in a couple weeks.

Bunny: Oh good.

Oren: This isn’t your grandma’s podcast. We’re all big boys here. We’re ready to do dark stuff, very dark stuff!

Bunny: But don’t worry about it because Chris seems fine.

Chris: Yeah, I’m fine. That was last week.

Bunny: [laughs]

Oren: Consequences are irritating, so I’m not gonna.

Bunny: Yeah. I just hate it when your parents die in their blood pools and cross your hands and in warm pools. It’s just a big downer.

Chris: Yeah. And also, I was gonna have a funeral for them, but that takes time. And, uh, I’m busy.

Oren: Man, I’ve gotten really sensitive to sequences where a character dies and the other characters are sad for a scene and then they move on. It’s, look guys, I get that it’s hard to depict a realistic grieving process in stories cause it takes a long time, but it just feels so inhuman to me now. I don’t like it.

Bunny: I feel like grieving in a lot of stories, people go with the do-characters-have-to-go-to-the-bathroom approach and just wave it off.

Oren: Yeah. It just doesn’t feel right. It just feels like there should be more effect in how they act if they’re sad.

Sometimes the reason they don’t act sad is cause the writers know that character is coming back and so they don’t wanna waste your time with a bunch of grief for a character you’re gonna see again. But that still creates dissonance even when that is the case.

Bunny: Oh, we did a comic about that. 

Oren: [laughs]

Chris: Yeah. I would say that if you want your audience to feel sad that somebody died, then take just a little bit of time to show how they gathered up the body and set it out to sea (or whatever you have in your setting) and put it into space and said a few words. It doesn’t have to be a full elaborate thing, but just something, because it’s weird when that is just skipped over and the characters are all fine again.

So in any case, we’re talking about when and how to add dark content. And this is because a pretty common mistake that we see in a lot of manuscripts is just getting some basic tonal choices wrong, and a lot of that involves the decision to add dark content and how much, and whether it fits the story. So I think it’s just worth talking about: When do you want dark content? What makes something dark? How to actually pull that off in a way that it feels like it’s doing the story justice and that feels like it fits the story?

Bunny: I think it would be helpful to try to define it a bit just because dark is a bit of a nebulous concept and it’s something larger than just making someone feel sad or something downer.

It’s more than just serious topics. ’cause it’s also how you handle them. And it’s also not the same as gritty and it’s different than just a horror movie or a horror story. But then it could be all of those things. But none of those are like necessary conditions perse. So how would we define this?

Oren: Yeah, is a dark story a sandwich? 

Bunny & Chris: [laugh]

Chris: Yeah. Obviously, it’s a collection of things. And so, we can talk about, okay, what are all the things that are belong in that collection? Right? And that’s, I think one of the reasons why it’s tricky is people think, okay, there’s this pool of things that I associate with dark stories, right? And I put a few of those in my story. Does that make it dark?

Sometimes. Sometimes not, right? Sometimes it just doesn’t fit. So, you know what’s included, right?

Gritty. Generally gritty is a kind of dark because it implies two things. It implies high realism and it implies dark. [laughs] So usually if you’re gritty, you have things like drugs and violence and sickness, and a lot of real-world non-glorious problems generally would be something that’s gritty. Things are run down, things are broken.

Bunny: So all gritty is dark, but not all dark is gritty?

Chris: Yes.

Oren: Yeah. I suppose in like thought experiments, you could come up with edge cases where something might qualify as gritty and not be dark. Maybe if you were doing a really realistic portrayal of someone’s job as a park ranger.

Chris: I would say that’s probably high realism and grounded, but I don’t know that people would call it gritty.

You could have a story that’s consistently gritty, but otherwise doesn’t have any dark elements and have it feel consistent. So you could say that story is gritty, but overall not dark. But I think the gritty elements would still make it darker.

So yeah, gritty would be one, but that’s a combination of darkness that is specifically just high realism.

So there’s also things like graphic violence and how explicit is it? Are we seeing lots of blood and gore, or a thing that I think writers don’t realize is if your character gets hurt, you do not have to describe a bone snapping. If you describe a bone snapping, that is a very graphic sound.

Oren: It’s also pretty long lasting.

The absolute worst is when they describe really serious wounds, really grievous injuries, and then the character either walks it off or they have super magic healing. So it’s just, yeah, all of my entrails are hanging out. I cast cure wounds! [magic sound].

I don’t like either option. If you’re gonna inflict serious wounds, I wish you would be ready to handle the consequences.

Bunny: It is very annoying, like you’re totally fine until your mouth starts bleeding. Then you’re screwed.

Oren: If you get a nosebleed, and that is a bigger problem in visual mediums than it is in prose because they have to communicate that a character is injured. And there are only so many ways to do that. Whereas like a prose author can describe more specific injuries. But I still see it in books, right? I still see characters get hurt and then are fine in the next scene.

Bunny: And we just touched on this, but I think this also brings up the point that. There can be like dark scenes in books that aren’t otherwise dark, which can cause dissonance for a class.

We read a book called Brown Girl in the Ring, and at one point in this book, a character gets skinned in a very graphic way. The book otherwise has some gross description of gore, but just general, there’s a duppy made out of meat essentially, and it’s not like anything so visceral and graphic as someone getting skinned. And people in my class were all like, that skinning scene was just, that came out of nowhere, that didn’t fit the rest of it.

Chris: I can talk more about tonal whiplash, right? I would call that an incident of tonal whiplash. Often that happens with graphic violence, and this is comes from a misunderstanding of what goes into an exciting scene. But yeah, anything that’s really graphic like that.

Then there’s also, just on the tension side, really high tension usually is considered a little darker. If it gets to the point where something feels outright scary, in particular, like in horror. Again, there can be stories that have a lot of life or death sequences that don’t necessarily feel dark, right?

But there is a point where it gets incredibly intense, that the story is interpreted as darker the more intense it is.

Or sadness if people die. If characters that readers are supposed to be attached to are supposed to care that they die and they’re supposed to feel bad about that, is definitely darker.

Or general world that’s just like bleak and filled with evil. Nobody’s happy in this world, everybody’s suffering. That would be instant of something that’s dark.

Bunny: Which can get silly, which I might talk about more later cause I have a bone to pick. 

Chris: [laughs]

So those are the really obvious things. But there’s also less obvious things like how much humor does the story have.

Because if you have a dark comedy, the humor element actually lightens the story up somewhat. So you can have dark comedies, but part of the special thing about a dark comedy is the humor takes some of the sting off. So generally the more humor you have that’s gonna lighten up the story a bit.

Are villains or problems ever laughed off? That’s a sign of a lighter story. Are the problems inflicted on your important characters (readers care about them) or is it nameless people who are suffering that we don’t care about that has less emotional intensity. And then we talked about this, but like the consequences. So when something bad happens, does the narrative actually take the time to realistically go into its full effects? Or does it just gloss that over and pretend like it didn’t happen, or like it doesn’t matter, or that people aren’t feeling the emotional blow of that, et cetera, et cetera?

So dark is a huge category and there’s a whole lot of different stuff that goes into it. 

Oren: You can almost say that trying to find the answer is dark and murky.

Bunny & Chris: Ooh, ooh.

Oren: One thing I’m curious about is to what extent you can change the tone of a story before you develop tonal whiplash? Because I think in a vacuum, we would mostly agree that it is possible for a story to get darker as it goes, harder to do the reverse, harder for it to get lighter as it goes. But at the same time there’s also an obvious point where it’s too far. Maybe you were starting to get a little darker, but now you tortured a character to death to summon an angel for no reason. Now we’re too dark. Pull it back.

Chris: Honestly, I feel a good example that talks about what kind of consistency you need is if you just think of your average haunted house movie. At the beginning, there’s going to be a house that’s creepy. There’s not gonna be ghosts coming out and murdering people, [laughs] but there’s still gonna be a house. It’s gonna feel creepy. There might be some backstory told about the house that’s creepy, and that kind of sets the stage and sets expectations for the dark things that come later.

That’s very different from, you think that this is like a romantic comedy or just a family drama and the family comes and settles in right, and everything seems happy, and then suddenly the ghosts come out and murder them all.

Oren: Yeah. I’m not gonna say you could never do that as a subversive joke, but you would probably do it pretty quickly, right? If you did this like an hour in. People are gonna be mad and your movie’s not gonna do well.

Chris: Yeah. Even as a subversive joke, I just think you have to think about what kind of audience you’re trying to attract and how you single to them, what kind of story it is, so that you’re not misleading them and getting bad reviews as a result.

Oren: Yeah, that’s true.

And the perfect example is something like Madoka Magica, which has what looks like a fairly light aesthetic and then gets much darker as it goes. But even early on there are signs that this isn’t gonna be like a perfect fun cakewalk. The characters talk about it being dangerous. Now we have been trained to think it won’t be because it has the magical girl aesthetics. Although nowadays everyone has seen Madoka Magica. So, we’re all in on the joke at this point. But when it first came out, that was a pretty big shift.

Chris: Yeah, I don’t remember the first episode, but I do know that the soundtrack for Madoka Magica is pretty dark, sets the mood pretty well.

And I would guess at least by some time in the first episode, you would have some serious sign that things are not, whether it’s characters trying to kill Kyubey. Kyubey being the character that makes girls into magical girls, and he’s very cute. He’s a cute animal, but he turns out to be not good.

Oren: He’s the woooorst!

Chris: But while you think he’s good, one of the protagonists is shooting him. But whatever, it kills his one body, he comes back in another one. Still, the sight of one of the protagonists shooting a cute animal is definitely out of the ordinary.

Oren: Yeah, that’s true.

Bunny: It does seem like most dark stories set up immediately that their atmosphere is going to be dark. Although, like you said, you can be subversive with the atmosphere as long as you provide hints and foreshadowing, I suppose that things will take a turn.

I don’t usually partake in much dark media, but one of my favorite series of books that are extremely dark is the Locke & Key comic series. Those set you out that this is gonna be a dark story, like right off the bat. It starts with a murder. And then so much of the rest of the books is dealing with the fallout of that and the ongoing grief and how characters become self-destructive and use the magical keys to become more self-destructive.

Chris: Yeah, so somebody important to them dies in the beginning and readers. Don’t have enough time to really get to know or care about him. But again, we are realistic about the consequences of what it’s like for this family to have their dad get murdered, right? Which is a real sign of something that is darker. Okay, somebody died and it was important to these people. And then we actually see the emotional blow. I think their mother struggles with alcoholism. Some of those kind of gritty, realistic problems in the story.

Bunny: And then there’s one of the characters who uses one of the keys to remove her sense of sadness or her sense of fear, and then she becomes like wildly reckless and even more self-destructive than she was to begin with.

So you could argue, of course, that’s not realistic cause it’s using a magical key to reach into your brain and take out a little representation of your fear or whatever. But it’s using that fictional element to further its realistic premise of grief and grieving.

Chris: And the aesthetics, again, support this because how that key works is… I think that she probably sticks it into her head.

Bunny: It goes into the back of your head.Up at the top of your neck. Yeah.

Chris: Yeah. So, when you grab this key a keyhole, it’s viscerally a little body horror there. The keyhole appears in the back of the skull. She inserts the key into it, and then what the graphics show is that her like head opens up like a hinge. She can dig into her brain. It’s not actually, you don’t actually see the brain as like images of the things that are in her mind, right? The whole thing looks creepy.

Oren: I remember there was some hubbub about when the show came out and it, they didn’t have that effect. Instead, it like opened a door and you stepped through the door into someone’s mind.

Chris: The show was so strange because it felt like somebody looked at the age of the protagonist and then assumed it was for a younger audience, and then made it lighter. Yes, there is a little boy character and a younger teen. And an older teen as the three protagonists, but this is not a story for preteens.

Bunny: No, very much not.

Chris: It’s like they just got the audience wrong.

Bunny: Did they age them down?

Chris: No, I don’t think they aged them down. I think they, it felt like their idea of who their audience was younger.

Bunny: Oooooh.

Chris: In both stories. The protagonist. Kind of represents your target audience. And so if you have a younger protagonist, that means a younger audience. And so I’m guessing somebody looked at this story and was like, oh, well we have this little boy and we spend a bunch of scenes showing him playing with these keys and misread, or, I don’t know, maybe it was successful and they were happy with our choice. I don’t know. But the audience for the graphic novels were certainly older than I feel like what the show was targeted at.

Bunny: Yeah. I would never gift that serious to a tween.

Chris: But that’s what it felt like who the show was for. I dunno, from my viewpoint.

So again, avoiding tonal whiplash is about being consistent with what kind of dark elements you have and not mixing up. Being what’s exciting with dark, right?

Because yeah, high tension is a little bit darker. But if you have a fight scene where people are technically could kill each other. They’re pointing laser guns at each other and trying to hit each other. But nobody has a wound that then they spent months in horrible pain recovering from.  Then we don’t need intense graphic violence.

You can make things exciting with good tension principles, right? Having high stakes, having a lot of urgency and immediacy to the fight. Making it really difficult, right? That’s what makes it exciting, not seeing somebody split open.

And I think that’s one reason why people have tonal whiplash is cause they’re like, oh, I need to make this exciting now. Then they add really dark stuff that are just inappropriate for the tone of the story.

Oren: Yeah, this is gonna be a different equation based on personal tastes. Cause there are people who just really like dark content, as a matter of taste. And then there are other people who don’t. So you might be writing a darker story because that’s the audience you wanna reach is, but that audience will also probably be annoyed if your story is suddenly randomly light at some parts of it because that just doesn’t match up with the dark stuff that they were promised. 

Chris: If your audience really comes for a dark story and your opening chapters show, no sign of that, they’re also gonna be disappointed. That’s the point of having it be consistent.

Another problem that I see commonly is what I call grim dark sauce.

Oren: [laughs]

Chris: Grim dark sauce is basically when you have excessive use of dark elements, but without any emotional impact that matches that. 

Oren: Yeah, that’s when you like barbecue a bunch of side characters cause this is serious business and like none of them matter, but you do get to describe how horrible their screams are. That was unpleasant, but it doesn’t really feel like it affected the story at all. Other than that I did not like reading it.

Bunny: Or do something really bad and then characters move on and just forget it. Even if it should traumatize them. And in this case, I think sometimes writers escalate to really intense what should be intense dark material because they don’t know how to make their dark material more intense and they want their story to be intense. So they just keep making it more and more extreme.

Oren: More! More!

Bunny: darkerrrrr!

Chris:  Cause they don’t know how to make what they do have impactful. So the solution to this one is to just make less mean more. So to bring dark things to life, ensure they have impact. So start small and have things happen to characters the audiences care about, and then actually illustrate their effects. Instead of glossing over them.

A smaller injury that causes ongoing pain and needs recovery time as opposed to a big excessive injury. And just being more realistic about the impact of things and getting detailed and encouraging emotional investment instead of just having everybody get slaughtered in the background.

Oh gosh. One of my hilarious ones for, this is the original Elric book. The premise of this book is supposed to be that the main character who is the emperor, is the only good person in an evil empire. But Moorcock has all of these side mentions of what this empire does to their slaves and they kill their slaves in so many ridiculous, creative ways.

It has me wondering how do they have slaves? How are there any left?

Bunny: Also, I feel like you, good emperor, could do something about this. 

Oren: No. Cause he has to pretend he’s not good or they’ll kill him. Shh. It makes sense. It makes sense. Don’t say it doesn’t.

Chris: Again, a lot of times with grim dark stuff, it’s not actually particularly realistic. And again, people tend to equate being realistic with being dark, but that is not the same thing.

Oren: It’s the same thing with contrived moral dilemmas. That stories come up with because you know you’re an author, you can theoretically create any set of cold equations if you want to.

You can create a scene where there is a basket of puppies and a baby on a seesaw, and there’s only time to save one of them. Which of them are you gonna save? And yeah, that’s unpleasant, but I don’t know if I would call that dark, exactly. It’s just annoying.

If you wanna use dark moral dilemmas, you have to pick one that feels real. And rather than just inventing one, using either authorial fiat, or your sci-fi or magic stuff. Because man, we have enough moral dilemmas in the real world. Why are you contriving new ones?

Bunny: And I think talking about the Elric book brings me back to what I was going to complain about, which I know many people will disagree with. And I’ve had arguments with friends about this. So I’m speaking from what I as a reader, experienced as dark content becoming silly in Parable of the Sower.

People like to call this book insightful. It’s drawing back the curtain on humanity, Hobbes and the. State of nature. That’s just awful with everybody killing each other, brutal, nasty and short or whatever he called it. It’s right. Can’t you see? And I’m like, this is a fictional scenario and it doesn’t prove anything.

Oren: Are people, Lord-of-the-Flies-ing it, where they’re treating it as evidence of how humans act?

Bunny: I’ve seen them Lord-of-the-Flies it. I’ve seen them do that, and I’m like, this is fiction, my friends.

Chris: I just found it really hilarious when there was a news story about a bunch of Catholic school boys actually being abandoned on the island together.

Oren: I’ll put a link to that story. So, they weren’t actually Catholic school boys. They were I think Tongan school boys, but yes, it was a similar situation. They were fine. They cooperated. And I’m sure people will argue that if they’d been Catholic, British school boys, they would’ve been different because they’re evil. And maybe that’s true. I don’t have an opinion on how evil British Catholic school boys are.

But Lord of the Flies is fake. It is made up. The person who wrote it has no special expertise to predict what would happen in this scenario. It’s not even clear if he was trying to predict what would happen in this scenario. He might have just been spoofing another novel that was popular at the time.

Anytime someone points to a work of fiction and is like, yeah, see that’s how people act. It’s like, no, no, it’s not. That’s made up. I made that up.

Bunny: The thing with Parable is also that Butler has been explicit that her intent with depicting the world, like the world of the United States. She wanted to show it as if it had become a third world country, which makes it extremely uncomfortable when her idea of a third world country is that everybody is constantly beating up and raping each other.

Okay, I am gonna say rape a bunch in this section, so be warned listening listeners.

It really did feel like. It would, some time would go by in the story, and then the story would be like, I haven’t mentioned rape in a while. So yeah, an attack happened and a lot of babies were raped. This literally happens in the story. And another point the characters come across, like kids roasting a leg on a spit like Butler, is this what you think third world countries are like?

Oren: Yeah, that’s one of those things where if you look in isolation, there are some truly horrific things that can happen in areas of conflict. But it’s way more nuanced than most fiction is prepared to get into. And so it just often feels cartoonish when books try to do that.

Bunny: At some point it stopped feeling dark and just started feeling silly, like the words were just being tossed around. 

Oren: After a certain point, it can’t shock you anymore, right? It’s already done. All of the things it can do. And I was like, oh, that’s happening again.

Bunny: And I’m sure people defending the book will bring it up and oh, it’s supposed to show Lauren, the main character, getting jaded. But Lauren is always just kind of jaded like this. She always describes it in the same way, which to butler’s credit is never gratuitous. Lauren describes things in a very matter of fact way without going into the grizzly details.

But it is also still full of these things, even if they’re not overly described.  And it just felt goofy. I was like, I shouldn’t be feeling like this is goofy.

Oren: Look, it’s war crimes a clock.  Okay? I have it on the watch and it’s been 10 minutes since the last war crime, and so now it’s time for another one.

Chris: So I think it’s worth just talking about the choice to make your story dark and whether you should or shouldn’t do that. There are lots of reasons to make the story dark. In some materials it makes more sense. Stories like Locke & Key, that was creepy and emotionally intense and did it in a great way. I would discourage writers from choosing to make something dark, just to make the work look serious.

Bunny: Yes.

Chris: Do you actually like dark material? If you really like that intense experience and you’re ready to cry while you’re writing, right then go for it.

But if you are doing this as performance to look legitimate, I just don’t think that’s gonna end up in a good place. I think you’re less likely to be consistent and you’re less likely to be happy.

Oren: I guess this is process advice, but I would just generally recommend against being like, this is gonna make my readers cry. I don’t think that’s a productive way to look at whether or not something dark should happen in your story. That can get pretty performative pretty quickly.

Chris: Yeah. I do think that making our audience upset makes us feel effective as storytellers, right? Because we had effect of them, and there’s nothing worse than handing them a story and they just feel nothing. So, we can get into this, Oh. But if we make them upset, that means that we successfully made the story powerful.

Just assume that you are a competent storyteller and you can make them feel whatever you want to. You don’t need to flex. Instead of thinking of, oh, I wanna make ’em cry. Right? Think of what payoff you want them to get. If you’re gonna do something upsetting, what do they come out of that experience with, that makes that worth it to them?

And then there definitely has to be a level of consistency. You know, if you look at your writing and you’re used to not being burdened with doing lots of scenes showing characters recover and showing the emotional fallout, are you prepared to then take the time to do that? If you want to have a darker work, as we said, spare that time for the funeral scene so it actually feels like characters are grieving somebody who died, that kind of thing.

If you do want a story that has lots of spooky monsters or blood and gore and you don’t wanna think too hard, you can just use dark aesthetics without having anything that’s really upsetting. I wouldn’t do the grim dark sauce where all the minor characters are dying in the background. But you can have something that is just, has creepy and spooks, but doesn’t actually have tons of death in it, and is not designed to make people sad, is just designed to be spooky.

So you can have a story like that is consistent in having haunts. That’s also another option. Or something where people are technically all monsters, but they’re kind monsters. So you’ve got skeletons and ghosts, but they all get along and hold hands.

You can do different combinations. Just think about that emotional impact and whether you’re ready to be consistent and show things have consequences or not.

Oren: Okay. Well, with that, I think we will call this daaark eeepisode to a close.

Bunny: [spooky] Wooo wooo! Wooo!

Chris: If you would never like to hear us moan again…

Everyone: [laughs] Woo!

Chris: …you can bribe us by going to patreon.com/mythcreants and giving us some support.

Oren: Before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.

[outro music]

This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Coulton.